“What is magic about the Magic Kingdom is that if you look at it through the right pair of eyes it points to a Kingdom more magic still that comes down out of Heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. The one who sits upon the throne says, ‘Behold, I make all things new,’ and the streets of it are gold like unto clear glass, and each of its gates is a single pearl.”

(Frederick Buechner, in The Eyes of the Heart)

At the bottom of “Kill Devil Hill,” just before ascent, our neighbors by the creek have a side yard with Mr. and Mrs. Snowman lit and live, hands clasped, heads tilted back as if seized by some moment of jocularity, eternally smiling, even in the dark of 6:00 am. I look closer, slow my walk. Between them they cradle a baby snowman, also smiling.

Seeing them I remember that we are not yet all lit at our home. A week or so ago, I plugged the lights on our front yard trees which we had left up all year into the outlet. My hopes were dashed. Part of one strand on one tree lit, its end a bare wire cut by an errant landscaper. The rest were dark. I gave up and opted for lower hanging fruit. The shrubs. I ripped open new boxes of tightly packaged lights, tearing twist ties carefully tied by Chinese workers, throwing aside the six point font “USER SERVICING INSTRUCTIONS” backed by “IMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS.” (Does anyone ever read such things? Paper and font suggest not.), snaking the colored lights randomly across the boughs of the shrubs and, finally, for those hard to reach places, tossing the colored glass with great hope, which is compensation for impatience. I bend and dig out from a pine straw bed the extension cord left waiting, coiled and also hopeful, since last year. I plug my glass minions in and bask in their display.

In my childhood, to see such colored lights my parents drove us across town, across the tracks. There, in their modest and hardscrabble homes, my distant neighbors collected all manner of cobbled kitsch, luminous in the winter night: head-high candles, reindeer, Santas, babyjesuses, angels, shepherds, and carolers. And snowmen. Sometimes, if we cracked the window, we could hear the strain of music, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, sung by Nat King Cole, or the like. We were warmed by the display, transported, our imaginations sprung. I was envious.

In a letter to family written during the Advent before his execution, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of living “in a great unseen realm of whose existence I am in no doubt.” He had only the Christmas lights of memory to brighten his Advent in a solitary jail cell. And yet he managed in solitude to see beyond the captivity of his present. And so I lose myself for a moment in the lights and try to imagine an eternally lit world, one where there is no need for sun or moon, where a vision says “the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21:23‬ ‭ESV‬‬).

We put lights on our trees to capture some ineffable presence, to testify to transcendence. To say as many have that they symbolize the light of Christ is a worthy metaphor. Yet perhaps it is more than a few strands of inexpensive glowing bulbs can bear. Maybe it’s enough to say that they remind us of something more, something beyond today, something unseen, a Magic Kingdom yet to come.

It’s a start.

Next year I’ll order some enormous lit candles for the front yard, and maybe a snowman. And Santa With his reindeer. For the children.